Category Archives: Radiopharmaceutical concepts

Radiometalation by gallium-68, copper-64 or zirconium-89 in chelating complexes attached to peptides or proteins make use of high specificity and selectivity of those compounds with the outstanding advantage of application in therapy just by taking a different radionuclide appropriate for therapy such as yttrium- 90 or Lutetium-177.

A recent very important alternative is the labeling with Al18F2+. The surprising feature is the fact that this compound was found to exhibit the property of a radiometal. Therefore, the advantages of fluorine-18 longer half-life (110 min) instead of 68 min in case of gallium, lower positron energy (0.65 MeV vs. 1.9 MeV (68Ga)) resulting in best imaging quality are combined with those of complex formation which keeps the alternative application for therapeutic use by using a different radionuclide. Continue reading →

PET primarily registers a physical signal originated by the tracer (radiopharmaceutical) and thus the PET signal is directly correlated by the biochemical concept of the tracer for assessment of the particular metabolism. Therefore, specificity and selectivity of the particular PET measurement are directly defined by the tracer. The concepts of metabolic trapping and metabolic blocking allow the external examination of metabolic processes.